I just this past weekend turned on my water-cooled dual Opteron

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A case -- I want something relatively quiet but, above all, it's gotta be cool.


I recycled a Lian-Li PC60 case. I still like their layout.

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A motherboard.


I got a Tyan Tiger K8W. Smooth sailing so far. I was also pleased to find Tyan-specific sensors.conf files for lm-sensors last eve on Tyan Web site. Made that easy.

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A CPU. Should I get an AMD64 or something exciting like that?


I confess I got Opterons 'cuz I liked the way it sounded. Nice package, though -- excellent contact with the waterblocks.

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Hard disks -- I'm considering going for RAID5 for reliability, and maybe sticking 3 or 4 disks in it, but that means that I'll probably want to opt for SATA -- 'cos PATA is a PITA to cable. This should be kept in mind when thinking about the case. So, do SATA RAID solutions exist that work with Linux (Debian/unstable)? Are they particularly hard to set up?


I forsook the on-board SATA RAID on the K8w for a 3Ware 2-port SATA card (like $140 at NewEgg) and am running 200GB RAID-1. For ~$300 you can get a 4-port 3ware SATA card that would support RAID-5. they are a cinch to set up. Nice monitoring daemon. The 3ware driver is pretty much same driver used for their PATA cards and has been in several distros for a while. I'd say that if you are using 2.6 kernel for Debian, you'll find it there automagically.
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Jim


'Tis the exceptional fellow who lies awake at night thinking of his successes.